Being surrounded by some careless buildings, resulting from the slightly casuistic “urban explosion” that like a curse reached all the country’s towns and cities as of the 1960’s, an anonymous place waits for some occurrence that might articulate the senses, instituting a point of departure towards an apprehensible and nameable organisation.

A new, 92 meter tall complex of soft, undulating curves marks the skyline of Groningen. This asymmetric, aerodynamic construction is set amidst small, ancient woodland, sheltering rare and protected species. The project includes the design, construction and financing of two public institutions; the national tax offices and the student loan administration. The commission from the RGD (National Buildings Service) includes, besides the architecture, the management and building maintenance and care of facilities and services for a period of 20 years. Accommodating 2,500 workstations, parking facilities for 1,500 bicycles and 675 cars in an underground garage, the building will be surrounded by a large public city garden with pond and a multifunctional pavilion with commercial functions.

The architecture studio A-cero presents one of its last works about a big single-family house. It takes place in the outskirts of Madrid on a 5,000 m2 plot. It is a single storey building and it has a 1,600 m2 built surface. The first sensation that this house produces when people go into the plot is that the building seems to be hidden between concrete walls and vegetable ramps that extend up to the roof. They are dyed in dark gray and contain, between them, vegetation areas that seem to climb towards the sky. The house´s façade show a spectacular organic view of the whole house and so even the hard concrete shows its most kind face.

This building, symbol of the long term and visible presence of EDF in the Meuse and Haute Marne region, hosts the company’s industrial records. Within the framework of the Meuse and Haute Marne economic support programme, EDF has decided to centralise all its intermediary Engineering Production Management archives in Bure-Saudron. Until now, these paper copy archives had been stored in nuclear, hydraulic and thermal production units, as well as in engineering units and associated services.

The project is a house prototype module for disaster relief areas – Haiti. The house is designed with the intent of creating a small self-sustained community. Our proposal seeks to minimize the area for a single house. The plan is divided into four 8’ x 8’ modules; each serving as a room. A bathroom/kitchen core divides the enclosed area into a sleeping quarter and a living/dining area. The fourth module is an exterior porch, which in turn can shift within the plan and provide a variety of public areas. The ‘L’ shape produced by the porch allows for the housing unit to be repeated in a small community while generating a private garden for each house.